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Food for thought.

PA – Performance Anxiety

I, personally, tend to strife for perfection, because in the back of my mind, I know it is impossible to achieve. Near perfection, yes. Total perfection? Nope. Two of my favorite animals, cheetahs and dolphins, showed me why my earlier way of thinking had to be wrong, at least misplaced or based on ill-informed semi- or non-secular, factoids. None of the animals I saw were identical. Let me repeat this one more time: none of them were identical. They looked alike and were easily spotted and classified as the species they belonged to, but not one of them looked exactly like a replica of the next one. I also have this unfounded, but very real, fear of sharks. Even they are recognizable as individuals within their section of the animal ‘kingdom.’ They bite, but not for fun, I have to grant them that, with or without fear. Therefore I have to conclude that performance anxiety is nothing more than a heavily inflated mutation of fear, its relative survival or a combination of both. In order to succeed, one has to be alive first. This notion relieves a lot of pressure from the day to day business of moving along and hopefully forward. Even when we sleep we move forward, 1000 miles per hour on this rock and an additional 100,000 miles per hour piggybacking on what some might describe as the ‘hindsight’ of our solar system. We humans have so much more to learn, because leveling off competition and survival of the fittest in the same league, is like confusing a tree for a forest.